Film Review

For a certain type of moviegoer, perhaps the type who, during the screening I attended, audibly applauded as a man's face was slow-cooked on a steaming griddle, The Raid 2 may very well be the best movie of all time. For many others it'll mostly rank as exhausting, a definitive technical achievement that varies between impressive feats of action showmanship and grueling beat-'em-up marathons. Improving on the taxing linear action of the original, it elevates chop-socky filmmaking to new highs in terms of conception and choreography, while remaining too focused on the relentless blur of fists and feet (and their resultant damage) to really rank as beautiful or compelling.

Unlike The Raid: Redemption, which turned the action into the entire focus, this larger-in-every-sense sequel revolves around a routine gang-war storyline constructed around careworn notions of familial strife and betrayal. This means a lot more work for Rama (Iko Uwais), the hero cop who, instead of being rewarded with a vacation after surviving the brutal onslaught of the first film, is sent deep undercover by a shady CID unit, infiltrating Jakarta's all-powerful criminal cartels to weed out the rampant corruption in the city's police force. It's a functional storyline, familiar but well executed, though mostly just connective tissue for the heaps of frantic set pieces. Rama's long-suffering wife gets introduced as a reminder of the stakes involved, but like most of the characters sketched out here, she only exists on the periphery, a dangling carrot for a beaten-down marionette of a hero, forced to fight incessantly for our amusement.

It doesn't help that director Gareth Evans hails from the Chris Nolan school of operatic incoherence, cutting fight scenes into ribbons, arcing everything toward the spectacular while foregoing the small stuff that might help make those big moments mean something. And while his fight scenes at least have a consistent point of view, it's that of a wide-eyed observer stumbling through the action, always in search of the coolest possible vantage, the camera drawn magnetically to each instance of bone-crunching mayhem. This means a lot of up-close shots of split limbs and busted faces, and while the staging of these melees is surely something to behold, the insistent way in which they gravitate toward bloodshed, and the overall length of the film, make for a deadening experience.

That's unfortunate, since there's a lot to appreciate here, from one of the best car chases in recent memory to the spectacle of emotional exhaustion communicated via an endless series of brawls. Yet unlike truly transcendent action films, in which the physical battles become part and parcel of a broader expression of conflict, The Raid rarely puts its combat in any context. It's all showy viscera, no ballet, and wan attempts at the gravity of something like Drug War, with implicit statements made about the deadening nature of violence or the moral equivalency of state-sanctioned and criminal force, don't come close to cohering. What the film delivers is the spectacle of a skilled martial artist manhandling roughly half the population of Indonesia, with a director who understands his collaborator's skills, and knows how to carve out ample space for him to operate. It's not the most high-minded experience, but it at least comes with the satisfying assurance that any room introduced will be totally laid to waste, that each character who enters will exit sufficiently bruised and beaten, and that viewers will leave the theater feeling similarly pummeled into submission.

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The Raid 2 was a huge disappointment. It's a film that would have been much better if the original had not been such a massive financial success; as it eschews the first's films positive B-grade attributes for something more fan boy-esque.

The first film may have been a genre picture, even reserved primarily for action fans, but so what? It took us back to a time when action movies were in bad taste, offensive and ultraviolent. It was energetic, and also had some grand moments of suspense and tension strewn about that let one breath. Such scenes as the main character hiding behind a wall of the apartment from his pursuers and another scene with a machete-bearing villain is hunting some characters hiding in a contained space were simply nail-biting.

It may have been easy to predict the outcome to an extent, but the director knows the biggest thing to garner suspense is anticipation, thus pulling you into the scenarios' universe. We may know what happens but that does not make it any less heart racing.

The Raid 2 may be ultraviolent, in bad taste and even offensive; but it feels fake this time around. There is not much here that separates it from a modern comic book film; the action scenes may be grander technically speaking, but they don't really feel like a build up to anything.

The first film's action scenes may not have built up to much as well, but to the film's credit they don't really try to. It was an unfettered and unrestricted action epic. The sequel seems to be trying to hard to mean something when it tries to add story, plot and even emotion in there, none of which Director Gareth Evans is good with. Maybe that's why the original worked so well with a leaner run time: It didn't try or have to try to be greater than it needed to be.

Posted by Nick S. on 2014-04-13 19:31:37

Some of my quick thoughts on The Raid 2:

The Raid 2 was a huge disappointment. It's a film that would have been much better if the original had not been such a massive financial success; as it eschews the first's films positive B-grade attributes for something more fan boy-esque.

The first film may have been a genre picture, even reserved primarily for action fans, but so what? It took us back to a time when action movies were in bad taste, offensive and ultraviolent. It was energetic and also had some grand moments of suspense and tension strewn about that let one breath. Such scenes as the main character hiding behind a wall of the apartment and another scene with a machete-bearing villain hunting for some characters hiding in a contained space were simply nail-biting.

It may have been easy to predict the outcome to an extent, but the director knows the biggest thing to garner suspense is anticipation, thus pulling you into the scenarios' universe. We may know what happens but that does not make it any less heart racing.

The Raid 2 may be ultraviolent, in bad taste and even offensive; but it feels fake this time around. There is not much here that separates it from a modern comic book film; the action scenes may be grander technically speaking, but they don't really feel like a build up to anything.

The first film's action scenes may not have built up to much as well, but to the film's credit they don't really try to. It was an unfettered and unrestricted action epic. The sequel seems to be trying to hard to mean something when it tries to add story, plot and even emotion in there, none of which Evans is good with. Maybe that's why the original worked so well with a leaner run time: It didn't try or have to try to be greater than It needed to be.

Posted by Nick S. on 2014-04-13 19:17:18

For me it’s not an issue of internal incoherencewithin the fight scenes (as I stated there is a strong POV, and there’s definitely some specific clarity to what’s going on in each specific battle). It’s that, despite a cleareffort by Evans to integrate every inch of the space he’s shooting in, there’sno sense of the overall movement within that space or how what happens in thosespaces relate to anything else. In the big prison fight, for example, theintent seems less to communicate the scale and movement of this huge, sprawlingbrawl than to isolate every single cool thing that happens within it and toss thosethings at us in rapid succession, and so the focus is isolated to showing us those things. It leaves no room for the scene to breathe, whichturns each battle into an arduous onslaught rather than a viewing experience thatactually builds toward something. It’s definitely an impressive movie but Ithink some larger context, aside from slapping a ‘violence is exhausting’ tagon a half-baked story to distract from how little connection there is betweenthose scenes and the showpiece fights that prop them up, would have been moresatisfying.

Posted by Jesse Cataldo on 2014-03-26 09:16:13

Always interesting how two sets of eyes can view "spatial coherence" so differently. You complain about "incoherence", Justin Chang at Variety says Evans "proves a dab hand at keeping the action in near-continual motion without sacrificing visual clarity". Surely something like "spatial clarity" in martial arts choreography is a more objective thing than other film elements: is it spatially clear or is it not? Or is it a bit of both?

Posted by wing_guts on 2014-03-25 14:22:48

Well if there's one person I never expected to see these movies compared to, it's Christopher Nolan...the first film managed that action-critic meme of "spatial coherence" as well as propulsive rhythms of cutting that successfully challenge the dominance of the long take. Nolan is a total one-eighty from that - messy, sloppy cutting that obscures any momentum or legibility.